Next Colony is one of those games where you start slow with only one planet and level 1 skills. Gradually over time you will increase your skill levels and few months later you will be overwhelmed by things you can do and rising complexity of managing 9 planets (my example).
Every planet has it's own resource economy, depots, shipyards and fleets. You can move your explorers to new planets that you found recently to increase the speed of exploration, right now I can send 12 explorers to do the job, that is a 12% chance to find a planet, then it snowballs. Your space empire starts growing fast.
Then you need to consider that every action is a blockchain action, every upgrade, every build option entry needs time to send, this is when game had some issues with heavy slowdowns when you couldn't do anything for a long period of time, luckily that has been fixed and every transaction right now is smooth and it completes in 4-8 seconds. That speed should be faster specially when you have many planets and many actions to do.
When I think about it DrugWars actually feels better to play even though the game is a complete nonsense atm. Considering Next Colony is 3 months younger I feel the team should be able to do something about transactions and overall stability of the game.
Here comes the interesting part, you know that reward pool that keeps on rising, it is still untouched, we have no idea when the rewards will start coming and how will be able to dip in them. We are blindly building towards something we don't know how it will look like, meanwhile they keep on printing pay to win blueprints for faster exploration and for faster transports.
Playing this game feels like sailing into the unknown with no land in sight. Maybe that is their goal who knows, to keep us guessing, I just hope they have something good planed, or this might go south. We shall see. In the meantime I'll keep on truckin. Space truckin.